Changing the direction of environmental investment in Australia: Learnings from implementing INFFER

Investment in natural resource management (NRM) by regional organisations in Australia
has been widely criticised for failing to achieve substantial environmental outcomes. The
Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER) is a tool for developing
and prioritising projects to address environmental issues such as water quality,
biodiversity decline, environmental pest impacts and land degradation. INFFER is an
asset-based, targeted, and outcome-focussed approach to environmental investment, and
as such is a very different and more rigorous approach to prioritising possible
environmental projects than used previously by most catchment management
organisations (CMOs) in Australia. From 2008 to 2010 INFFER has been trialled with
CMOs. Evaluation and benchmarking data obtained at 2-day INFFER training sessions
with seven CMOs in three eastern Australia states are reported. Before commencing to
use INFFER, CMO staff are generally confident about the current decision-making
processes for environmental investment used within their organisation. In some cases, this
initial perception challenges their acceptance of a new approach to investment decisionmaking.
Key issues when implementing INFFER include concerns about changing the
direction of CMO investment, concerns about compatibility with funder requirements,
and various issues associated with specific aspects of the Framework. Perceived
complexity of INFFER, existing institutional arrangements, and the legacy of past
institutional arrangements remain serious barriers to the adoption of methods to improve
environmental outcomes from NRM investment. Despite these difficulties INFFER is
being used by a number of CMOs. However, it is likely that widespread adoption of
INFFER, or indeed any other transparent and robust process, will only occur with greater
requirement from governments for environmental decision making by regional NRM
bodies that is more focused on outcomes and cost-effectiveness.